Roughly once a year I dare to look at my analytics and try to work out where it's all going wrong. In order to give myself more incentive to actually do this, it's nice to write about it in this blog. So really I'm just talking to myself here, but you might find it interesting, I dunno...
TOPIC ONE:
POOTUBE
After last year's analysis, I concluded that doing more abridged commentary videos would be the best plan. How did that pan out? Here is the list of the best performing videos from the last year on the channel:
There is one narrative video in there, a mysterious anomoly apparently because the rest are all pretty much just the most viewed episodes of abridged commentary serieses (there is no plural to series is there? english please).
Strangely, the 'didn't have time to make an actual video' video is the number one video of the year. From anecdotal evidence from other youtubers, that is usually how things tend to go. Now, should I conclude that the lack of the '|' divider in the title caused it to do well? It was also the only video in the list that had no thumbnail, bucking usual recommendations. Is it the use of the word 'failed', a big keyword on the internet? Is it the lack of a number in the title, implying more concentrated content? Is it all of these? Is it none of these? Thanks for listening to my list of rhetorical questions, I will now not answer them, and maybe change my behaviour based on a quasi-religious interpretation of these 'signs'.
How did these videos effect the channel's performance overall? We can look here at the 2 year view chart.
The right looks a bit higher than the left, vaguely. This means GOOD results.
However, what if we bring up the 4 year view chart?
Well now it's starting to look like this last year was about the same as 2 years ago. Well, I'm still going to claim a victory, as the downward trend of 2018-2019 was apparently reversed by the new abridged-commentary-focused schedule.
It's not all about views though is it? Well, I was going to analyse other factors, but watch time, subscriber gain, and revenue all have pretty much the same pattern. There is something to note with revenue though: youtube recently began a campaign where it automatically places mid-roll ads on videos long enough to support them that didn't already have them, which was pretty much all of my stuff. This has actually caused montly revenue to DOUBLE over the course of this year! This sounds pretty good, but it's not especially exciting as it just acts to counterbalance the halving of revenue the previous year. So we're getting back to 2018 levels now, which will come to as much as $400 a month. Whether or not that's a high amount depends on how much time it takes to make videos I guess, so let's calculate...
If we don't include filming gameplay, I estimate my weekly schedule has about 16 hours of writing, recording, and editing. That would come to like $6.25 an hour, not all that bad really is it? Only problem is it can't scale up - I can't do more than 16 hours due to the need to film gameplay, which is the limiting factor in production speed. So I can at least moan about being both beneath minimum wage and underemployed, and it's all those damn video games' fault! I am the most downtrodden person on Earth.
It's actually better than it looks since the youtube channel has a patreon that at least doubles the 'hourly rate' I can pretend to be making. The goal, by the way, is still to get rid of or minimise the patreon, but I can't justify closing it since people are inexplicably paying me money for years on end on there, and it makes carrying on that much more worthwhile. Especially if my $400 a month revenue estimate turns out to be just the previous month, which technically it was. The lines on graphs never go down right, only up?! ONLY UP?! PRAISE THE ALGORITHM!
Anyway, the broad overview for youtube is that things have improved, at least if we only look at the last two years. In that regard views, engagement, and watch minutes are up about 20-30% on 2019. That's a growth rate to get any board room salivating. Just don't look back any further than that, okay?
Oh I forgot to look at bloody subscribers! That was probably because I have long since stopped really monitoring my sub count. It still trickles up the same 10-15 per day rate it's been at the last 3 or 4 years. Apparently I gained nearly 6K subs in the last year. That seems surprisingly good at first, but thinking about it I think that's pretty poor given the growth of other youtube channels and youtube audiences in general. We need a way to factor in youtube 'inflation' caused by increases in the numbers of registered accounts over time. E.g. if global youtube accounts increased by 5% in a year, then a 4% gain in sub number is a real-terms reduction. Guess it doesn't really work like that since you can't devalue a 'viewer' below 1. Or can you? I'll expect my economics degree in the post.
It's all just the classic problem because in the youtube space there only needs to be two or three youtubers covering any given thing. And there are approximately sixty quintillion youtubers covering boyish video game topics. So by the time the algorithm gets down the list to you it's already served up all the recommendations via the small pool of tried and tested channels. There's only like 20 video slots on a given screen after all. Well, that's my religious theory on why my videos won't escape my own subscriber pool. Next sermon I'll interpret ancient latin scripts on the 'click through rate' and conclude that god doesn't want us to write with lower case letters.
Plans for the coming year: just do the same things again. I'd really like to branch out into other game demographics; in particular I want to do a civilization abridged series, or even something really comfy like an fps adventure presented roughly like a video diary or what have you. But I'm too scared. I did start making a series like that in 7 Days to Die during some spare time in my schedule during the testing of Godless Tactics, but then that time went away.
Hey, speaking of Godless Tactics let's look at...
TOPIC TWO:
VWIDYAYO GHAYMNE
This year I released a video game! Weird! It was called Godless Tactics and apparently people enjoyed it. Most common complaint was the $0 dollar aesthetic. But people liked the $0 game design. I spent the few weeks after it came up squashing some exciting bugs, including a couple of game breakers as I recall, then I've just left it to stew away in the background while I work on other things. It's sold something like 1400 copies, and tends to get 1 or 2 more a day. I'll have made like 4 thousand bucks from all this, but whether that makes up for the time it took to develop it over the years I don't dare calculate.
Ah but here's the interesting part. I decided that I would try actually advertising the game! Someone had messaged me almost begging me to go advertise it since it was apparently worth putting out there, so I had a serious look into the disgusting world that is so close to my heart: youtube ads. I made a 40 second ad-trailer thing, and found that youtube makes it extremely easy to put out ads; the process was virtually the same as just publishing a regular video. Except that it's linked to your bank account!
For a period of two weeks last month I spent a whopping £60 (like $80) on getting my trailer onto turn based tactics related videos across youtube. This has pretty much doubled the game's budget, huh? This bought me about 7000 'impressions', that meaning they showed the ad, and 2700 views, meaning the person watched at least 30 seconds of it (i.e. pretty much all since it was only 40 seconds in total) or clicked on it to go to the steam page. That's actually quite a lot - more than a third bothered to watch the majority! I had assumed the drop off from 'skip ad' would be much higher.
This means it costs me about 2-3 pence to tell one person about Godless Tactics. If I stand to make about £2.50 from a full price sale of the game, that means I need roughly 1/100 people to actually buy the game as a result to make this scheme break even. Let's look at the data:
So, I should probably tell you that the advertising period was the right side of this chart, starting Sep 19 and ending Sep 29. Wait a minute... THE PERIOD WITH THE ADS HAS LOWER SALES THAN THE ONE BEFORE?! CAPITALISM SSSSSUUUUUCCCCCKKKKSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!11shift+1eleventyone. I've been lied to.
Therefore, operation advertise was a failure, and I decided to not spend any more. Could it be that I need to reach a certain amount of spending and exposure before I am likely to see any results? Maybe. I bet google's bank account would like me to think that at least. Or, could it be that there is just a disconnect between people who watch youtube ads and those who purchase indy turn based tactics games with a $0 aesthetic? Youtube ads could simply be a bad approach.
My next sales scheme is a more basic one: GT will get a discount in the halloween, autumn, and winter steam sales. As a steam insider I know when these sales are, but I'm not allowed to tell you, such sacred knowledge! Although any detectives among you might be able to work out when a 'halloween sale' is likely to happen. As a reward for reading this blog, here's some insider info: I'm gonna make the discount on the winter sale a bit bigger than the halloween or autumn sales, so if you want true value, you better wait until then huh?
The game currently has a whopping 3000 wishlists, so that's 3000 people who'll get some form of reminder to buy the game for each of the three sales. Free advertising isn't it? I guess the discount on the sale price is the ad price, but then if it wasn't going to be bought without it... Damn, where's that economics degree already?!
In conclusion, buy the game, it has 98% rating on steam, but didn't sell enough for steam to recommend it to people yet. Lots of blogs out there speculating on the magic amount you need to get on to the steam internal algorithm listings, but agreement seems to revolve around numbers like 250 positive reviews or 10,000s of sales, so I'm a ways off there eh?
TOPIC THREE:
WORD DOCUMENTS FOR SALE
Just recently the test version of the official The Fire Margin novel game in. In real life! Since Godless Tactics ended I have been editing it together into a book format, and getting it printed up with its cool new cover marks a triumph in internet gaming fanfiction. Now it needs proof reading, adjustments etc. and a final version will be ready.
What I need to do is email Lo-Fi Games and find out if they mind me charging money to give this to people, since they technically sort of own a part of the IP inside. Probably. We'll find out. But yes the goal will be to have several such OffyD books available as merchandise of sorts, on some kind of store page on the website. This is a very vague plan at the moment. One thing I plan to do later is drop a cool £100 on a stack of 10 reserved ISBN numbers so that I can distribute books on official platforms like the Kindle. Will this cost more than I am likely to make selling these commemorative books? Almost certainly. But it's just for the glory now.
The other candidates right now are: The Promised Crown, Last of the Lamplight, Honour Among Kings, and For Them, Forever. Each of them are too short to easily make into a standaone physical book, but can certainly be ebooks. Promised Crown is all edited and stuff already, just needs to actually be formated into a book. Honour Among Kings, the longest, needs a total edit overhaul, because it is pure trash - my fun 'let's write like it's the 15th century' imitation style, combined with forcing myself to include out-of-the-way events from the related total war campaign, makes it quite bad, imo. Last of the Lamplight will probably be fine, so I'll format that up next.
But there will be another ebook opportunity coming soon, for I am 7K words deep into a new project right now. That being...
TOPIC FOUR I MAKE ANOTHER ONE
TOMORROW as of the writing of this I will release the first part of my new writing project. It is an attempt to turn a game of Rimworld into a proper story, which I do by overwhelming demand since it was pretty much the main thing I've had requests for over the last year. The game itself claims to be a 'story generator', and while I contend with this, I am going to MAKE it into one!
As with many projects, a lot of effort it going into trying to make the scenario the game takes place in plausible, and to generally explain why this unassuming 'combat-agriculture simulator' is the topic of a story at all. The first two chapters are essentially just a long introduction to the scenario and characters the game drops on you in the beginning.
I've played 20 hours of the game already. I find it fun and relaxing to play, but the real reason to get so far ahead was to avoid backseating and spoilers. Basicaly I wanted to make my little colony/base as much as possible before I get spoiled on what the best way to make it is. Ah the tribulations of playing games publically. I was only so cautious as I had Stellaris 100% spoiled midway through, which made me much less interested in where the game was going. (Turns out it wasn't going anywhere, but that's a rant for another time).
I wanted to the story to be an anime like The Fire Margin, but what I've written so far is more down to Earth than I expected. I think it's going to be less wacky, unfortunately, but I hope to make up for that with some interesting, realistic seeming character interactions, and an attempt to portray the regressed-futuristic feel of the game through the eyes of colonists who are still learning everything for the first time. What am I talking about? I dunno, but I probably won't reference anime so much. I have already starting laying the groundwork to reference kpop though. I need at least SOME degeneracy or it's not worth writing, is it?
No idea how long this will be, but I'd like to do some time-skips to jump over long periods of game where the characters are just harvesting rice for a season, that sort of stuff. Given that I wrote about 45 mins of narrative about the first 90 miniutes of the game, we'll need some big skips to get anywhere!
***
Okay I've blogged a lot now, should probably go and actually do some of the things I keep threatening to work on. Let's try and be 20-30% better by next year. OffyD Corp. stakeholder meeting is DISMISSED!
